PLD DPS, enrage and sustainability.

[Cabalabob]

So there's been a lot of talk about how PLD needs a buff both to its offensive and defensive capabilities because it can't keep up with current endgame requirements.

While I partly agree, it's true PLD needs some buffs, I believe the issue does not lie mainly on PLD but on the way the game is designed.

Enrage timers
The first issue to tackle is PLD does not meet dps requirements to beat the raid. The reason for this is enrage timers. If you don't beat the boss in, say, 10 mins, it'll wipe you out with an unstoppable, instant death attack.

Now, let's look at the purpose of enrage timers. In ffxi the enrage timer was introduced to stop people holding monsters while their party arrived, people could hold a monster and just run around with it for hours while their friends arrived and other parties who were ready to kill it could do nothing but watch and hope the person kiting it would die.

So the ffxi devs added the enrage timer. If a monster was claimed for, say, an hour, it would hit enrage, boosting its strength, speed and defence, basically making it wipe out the people on it's enmity list until it was unclaimed (making it reset) at which point another party could claim it and try their luck.

So, how does this translate to ffxiv? I'd say, if we take a similar view as ffxi, that the purpose of enrage would be to limit the time a party spends in the instance.

Now there are 2 issues with this. The first being we are already limited to how long we can spend in an instance by the duty timer. There's no need for an enrage timer to limit us because we're already limited.

The second issue is that the enrage timer accomplishes the exact opposite of limiting us, it extends the time we spend in a raid because instead of killing the monster it resets and we have to fight it again!

So, what purpose does the enrage timer actually serve in ffxiv? It makes the primary requirement for a raid, DPS. Tanks survivability and healer MP management are secondary to DPS, because once you learn how to fit your cooldowns/MP into that short time you have to kill the boss, you're done it's all on the DPS from there.

But is this a bad thing? No, I don't think it is sometimes! There are some fights where the primary concern should be DPS, for example Odin or the ultima weapon with zantetsuken and ultima. These fights are designed to kill the boss before it uses it's instant death attack so your primary concern should be DPS.

However, there are also fights where the enrage is completely out of place. 2 examples, ravana extreme and shiva extreme.

I loved the ravana fight, DPS was important because if you don't have high DPS you get extra mechanics per phase, but nothing you can't handle with good tanks and healers. BUT, what ruined the fight for me, was the enrage timer. Instead of the fight being a constant battle until either you or ravana drops, requiring sustainability and good resource management, it just becomes another race against the clock like every other fight. And it just didn't make sense!! One second ravana is saying "such a glorious battle!" The next "eh, I'm bored, you die now".

Shiva was similar, she had a soft enrage, every round she would gain a stack of damage up, making her hit harder each time until eventually you won't be able to take it anymore. So then what was the point in ALSO giving her an enrage timer where she just instant kills you with diamond dust? Why not just let the damage up stacks keep building so a good party with effective tanks and healers can take her down slower with less DPS?

So, having enrage is not bad in itself, but having enrage in every encounter is bad. Because it makes the tanks have to add more DPS rather than more survivability which goes against Paladins strength. Taking out enrage from some content will go a long way in helping PLD be relevant.

sustainabilty
However, removing enrage timers, while solving the issue of PLD DPS, doesn't solve all the issues. Even if enrage is removed the PLD can still only last so long before it runs out of cooldowns so you can't just keep going forever even if the lack of enrage allows it. PLD has issues with sustainability (this may also extend to DRK).

When in an encounter, PLD has a cooldown rotation for tank busters, but what happens when that cooldown rotation runs out? The PLD has nothing left and dies. WAR on the other hand, has readily available moves to reduce damage at all times. Inner beast and storm's path. They may not be as powerful as some cooldowns PLD has, such as sentinel, but it's enough to survive a tank buster no matter how many get thrown at you and it works on all types of damage. PLD has only 3 cooldowns that work on magic, rampart, sentinel and hallowed ground. So once you do rampart > sentinel > hallowed > rampart > nothing left = dead. PLD and DRK need a readily available cooldown, but it has to be consistent and work on all damage types but only be the bare minimum of mitigation to survive a tank buster. Much like inner beast and storm's path for WAR.

What this will do is give PLD and DRK the same ability as WAR to survive no matter how long the fight goes on. But won't be enough to be relied on completely or it will strain your healers. Something to use but also to pair with another cooldown to really reduce the damage.

So say sheltron made you block 100% both physical and magical on the next hit, and dark dance did the same. 30 second cooldown you'll have it for every tank buster and it will be effective on all damage types. But if you only use sheltron/dark dance you'll still be taking a lot of damage.

So you'll pair it with rampart and sentinel etc. much like WAR pairs inner beast with vengeance, but when they don't have vengeance, inner beast alone is still sufficient.

This will allow PLD to fulfil it's role as less damage but more defence, making it the go to tank if you can't meet dps checks and need more survivability which will be an option if there's no enrage timer, as opposed to the current system where you HAVE to meet the checks which PLD can't meet or die no matter what.

[LeeraSorlan]

Enrage timers exist so people dont take the easy route.If you had say 70 minutes to beat a boss, why would you take dps?
You could go 7tanks and 1 heal, the increased defense and cooldowns would make most mechanics and healing alot easier. As there i no dps check/enrage. You could simply hit the boss for minutes on end until its death with minimal requirement besides keeping people alive.


I think they should have soft enrages with heavy mechanical play, like how coil was.
It had enrages, but they werent extremely strict, mess up a mechanic and u die. In alex, you dps, do the very few easy mechanics the raids have, and dps more

[SpookyGhost]

Enrage timers exist so people dont take the easy route.If you had say 70 minutes to beat a boss, why would you take dps?
You could go 7tanks and 1 heal, the increased defense and cooldowns would make most mechanics and healing alot easier. As there i no dps check/enrage. You could simply hit the boss for minutes on end until its death with minimal requirement besides keeping people alive.

This isn't entirely true. Enrage timers and DPS checks are not necessarily one in the same. You can have consistent DPS checks (ie adds that need to be burned down in X time or they'll kill everyone or something similar, like Straf's MP wipe in A4S) but no enrage timer - the DPS checks would just keep showing up and you'd have to keep completing them, so the quicker you kill the boss the less you have to deal with those DPS checks. This, in and of itself, could work as a soft enrage timer - slowly draining your resources til you can no longer meet that DPS check.

But there's a difference between that and a flat time based enrage, forcing you to constantly push out optimal DPS to not reach the thing that kills everyone. There's ways to actually circumvent wiping to a constant DPS check showing up, such as Bard's songs or specific CD/LB usage, but there's absolutely no way to circumvent an enrage timer outside of doing more DPS overall.

[AnimaS]

ya like LBing Pheonix to get 4 bennus in 12^ basically it highlights the raid itself didn't have much thought put into it.....

[AnimaS]

this was a poorly developed expansion with no depth just a story. The first time you step into Gordias you are not stunned just follow along and there is faust, who is it? suppose it doesnt matter... the first fight is great. I think it was designed pretty well mechanically but a let down on the eye...T5 looked better even, speaking of T5,what happens in A2? we're back in T4!

[zcrash970]

The point of an enrage timer is to add stress to be optimal throughout an entire fight.
It would get to the point to how long a group can outlast mechanics and heal through it. The only mechanic that I can think of that will be impossible to outlast is Ark Mourn. Eventually there will be too many hits to survive but I imagine top end players would find a way to survive until it is no longer possible.

The removal of enrage will take away a great deal of stress and will make fight easier overall.

You also need to realize tank and healer dps is only counted in PROGRESSION content. Like when a new ex primal or top end raid is released. Where we are running content way below the recommended ilevel.

There is also the fact that maybe PLD isn't just good in the first few floors of Alexander. Eventually all jobs are going to have content where there they fall behind. SMNs had FCoB, MNKs had T6,7 and 9, and DRGs was weaker than everything until they got buffed.
Who knows? PLD might be required in the second set of floors for progression.

Does PLD need some tweaks? Yes, but just a small boost to dps or party support. The gap between the tanks dps isn't too wide.

[Kenji1134]

The concern is "fair homogenization".

WAR has more dps based CD's, and Maim, because WAR is designed to do more dps while tanking, hence they have abilities which enable them to do that.
PLD has more defensive CD's, and generally stronger defensive CD's, and blocking, basically PLD is designed to be a stronger mitigation tank, with less dps.

The problem is the current meta outright requires tanks to pull more dps, and whichever tank does the least dps is dubbed garbage, which due to its more defensive skillset, is PLD.

Suppose PLD gets some potency buffs or FoF's CD is halved, or whatnot, and PLD does the same dps as WAR and DRK, which keeping their stronger mitigation CD's.
On a fight where you have tank busters that come every 2 minutes, a PLD has perfect CD's for all of them, and some extras to throw inbetween. In such a situation, why would you take a DRK?

I think thats the hidden reason here.
As many have noted, DRK's skillset is somewhat incoherent, and defensively is a weaker version of PLD. But since DRK has a readily available magic mit CD, and the current top end raid content is almost all magic tank busters, that one aspect of DRK pushes it well past PLD in terms of efficiency.
How did this happen you ask? Cause SE wants people to play or at least level the new HW jobs, so they gave said job a niche... cept that niche happens to be ALL of the current endgame raid content.
Otherwise nobody would play it at endgame and SE would have wasted development time.

[Alahra]

I'd like to see fewer hard enrages and more soft ones, preferably. I recognize the necessity for them to some degree (if every fight had DPS checks only in the form of add phases, for instance, it would get stale). But I think they've been overusing hard enrages lately.

[Cabalabob]

Enrage timers exist so people dont take the easy route.If you had say 70 minutes to beat a boss, why would you take dps?
You could go 7tanks and 1 heal


I think they should have soft enrages with heavy mechanical play.

While I see your point about enrage being there to prevent bringing tanks instead of dps, it doesn't necessarily have to be an enrage to stop this, like you said more soft enrages can prevent this such as my examples of shiva and ravana, where lacking dps means more mechanics per phase or more damage taken as the fight goes on until it is unbearable (but unbearable based on your skill not based on the fact it is literally unstoppable by anything you do).

[Seku]

Why not just let the damage up stacks keep building so a good party with effective tanks and healers can take her down slower with less DPS?

Because until SE lowers Tank and Healer DPS they can go through the fight pretty much w/o a problem with like 2 tanks, 1 brd/mch and 5 healers. Reason most content is hard to beat upon release has -never- been mechanics alone. It's been Mechanics AND DPS checks.

WAR has more dps based CD's, and Maim, because WAR is designed to do more dps while tanking, hence they have abilities which enable them to do that.
PLD has more defensive CD's, and generally stronger defensive CD's, and blocking, basically PLD is designed to be a stronger mitigation tank, with less dps.

Also you're wrong. They actually have the same number of cool downs, which is 9. PLD's "defensive advantage" is it's passive mitigation provided by it's shield and ease of use of it's cool downs as it doesn't really need to pair them together.

The passive mitigation from the shield (w/o cool downs) is only really good when you have a lot of mobs, which is why people still take PLD's to A2s. Their Defensive CD's alone are stronger than War's, but if the WAR is any where near half decent they'd know their CD's are up often and will pair them together to match a PLD's cool downs and will have them on hand more often.

Paladin
Rampart, Sentinel, bulwark, Hollow ground, Convalescence, Shelltron, Foresight, Blood bath, awareness.

Warrior
Inner beast, Raw Intuition, Convalescence, Homolgang, Bloodbath, Vengeance, Thrill of battle, Foresight, awareness.

Suppose PLD gets some potency buffs or FoF's CD is halved, or whatnot, and PLD does the same dps as WAR and DRK, which keeping their stronger mitigation CD's.
On a fight where you have tank busters that come every 2 minutes, a PLD has perfect CD's for all of them, and some extras to throw inbetween. In such a situation, why would you take a DRK?

Yet again, you're wrong. PLD is currently the first of the 3 tanks to run out of cool downs due to the CD's being on long timers, DRK will be in the same boat as PLD when it comes to physical tank busters. Drk, as you were mentioning as being the inferior tank due to it's Defense CD's if PLD got a buff to damage, actually has copy and paste versions of PLD's CD's as well as it's rotations of cool downs and a advantage in magical damage fight due to having a low cool down on Dark Mind and Dark Arts to pair with the other defensive cool downs, such as shadow skin and shadow wall.

As for the reason why you'd take a DRK. The only reason their being taken now is so that the LB gauge doesn't get gimped and the fact they replace a monk's INT down. They need a bit of fixing too.

Dark Knight
Shadow Skin, Shadow Wall, Living dead, Dark Mind, Dark dance, Convalescence, Foresight, Awareness, Blood bath.

9 again.

Drk loses out on a shield and some damage reduction from Shadow Wall, which makes them slightly weak for pack's of mobs, other than that they handle a fight the same way as a PLD does.